A while ago I posted a rather uncharitable thing about board games, in which I confessed to the world that I hated them, and ever since then the world has been queuing up to tell me why I’m wrong. I’ve missed a fair few playdates since, but today I finally had the first lesson in my much-needed re-education, courtesy of Lost Cities. There could hardly have been a better candidate for helping change my mind, since it takes less than 3 hours (a lot less) to play, doesn’t involve batteries or any cheap bits of plastic, isn’t stupidly dice dependent, and takes all of 20 seconds to set up. So today turned out not just to be the first time I played a board game and liked it, it turned out to be the first time I played a board game three times in a row and liked it. I could explain to you how it plays, but it would be entirely redundant - partly because it’s dementedly simple, but mostly because you can just go and download it on Xbox Live and find out for yourselves.

There’s an irony there, of course - that my new favourite board game is actually also a videogame - but I’m going to ignore that for now, just as I’m going to ignore my nagging worry that Lost Cities is really a card game not a board game, so I haven’t broken my jinx at all. Instead, I’m going to revel in the discovery that board games have brilliant stories. Who knew? Lost Cities tells its across the glorious time-lapse pictures that decorate its cards, but my new Favourite Game Story Ever (taking over from New Zealand Story’s ‘Drat! A walrus has stolen my friends!’) is that of Lost Cities stable-mate, Igloo Pop:

The young ice giant has a big problem: he wants to buy fishsticks, but he cannot remember how many and he has nine shopping lists in his basket. So he goes from igloo to igloo and shakes each. In each he listens to the delicious fishsticks bouncing off the igloo walls. When he thinks that the igloo in his hand has the same number of fishsticks as one of his shopping lists, he takes it home. When he gets home, there are no fishsticks in the igloo. Instead, wild and laughing Eskimo children tumble out of the igloo. Excitedly they shout, “Shake us again!” “That was great fun!” “This is super”, thinks the young ice giant. “Now, I have found some new friends to play with!” And, he promptly forgets all about his shopping lists.

What could beat that? Well, I’m hoping 1960: The Making of a President will, since it’s the game I’ve been most frequently recommended since I ‘fessed up to my board game humbug last year. But 1960 won’t be my next piece of gaming re-education. Tomorrow I’m heading down to the South Bank to see if the Hide and Seek festival can cure me of the cripplingly British self-consciousness which tends to ruin pervasive games for me. Jane McGonigal will be running a session of Cruel 2 B Kind, and bunch of other games will give you - if you come along, and why wouldn’t you? - a chance to be a freemason, a beachcomber or a bee. Kazoos, I’m assured, will be provided.

[Photo credit: Library Gamer]

I was up at Game Republic last night, sitting on a panel unusually rich in Edge DNA, which was a very pleasant way to spend an evening. In amongst arguing about how many popes died having sex (Google it at your peril), we also hit on the eternal ‘games need better stories to attract girls’ proposition. My problem with this line of reasoning isn’t just the fact that female gaming hours are mostly put into non-narrative games, but that it tends to trap the games industry into a bafflingly self-defeating series of assumptions, which go like this:

Games need to be more emotionally engaging.

The way to emotionally engage players is with better stories.

Stories are about plot and character.

Plot and character are best explored through dialogue.

Dialogue is best expressed via high-fidelity character models and voice actors.

Every single point along that road is wrong. And every single point along that road takes games somewhere expensive and difficult.

Emotionally complex games are great, but so are emotionally crude - or indeed emotionally barren - games. If only emotionally sophisticated games are great, I wouldn’t have spent two hours yesterday playing Verbosity.

Games are perfectly capable of emotionally engaging their players without story. I have an incredibly rich emotional connection with Guitar Hero because of the hours I spent being rubbish at the violin, because of the years when bad 80s rock was an essential escape from a dorky childhood, because of the memories I have of playing live on stage with the lovely (and sickeningly good) Jonathan Smith, because of the pride I have in my eventual mastery of Expert. These are all complex emotions. They have nothing to do with narrative. They have everything to do with why Guitar Hero is a brilliant game.

Stories don’t need to be about plot or characters. Even leaving aside the emergent stories that players create for themselves through their interactions (whether it’s getting stuck up a pillar for 3 hours in Warcraft or pulling off some amazing victory in PES), there are games that tell stories implicitly through their character design, their architecture, their music, their mechanics. Don’t believe me? Go play Gravitation.

And even if you have characters you want to explore and narrative threads you want to unspool, dialogue isn’t the only, nor necessarily the best way to do it. Shadow Of The Colossus has a story that’s told almost entirely without dialogue, despite it having a formal narrative and strong characterisation. It tells its story through the landscape, through animation, through subtleties of the control scheme. I get more sense of the hero’s character, and of the background narrative of the game, through they way that he’s slightly too small for his horse, shown by the idle animation that has him twist in the saddle to relieve the pressure on his hips - through the way the control scheme requires him to put his trust in a horse that has more experience of being ridden than he has of riding - than I would get from an hour of torpid dialogue.

But even if you’re certain you want plot, characters and dialogue, cinematic cut-scenes - even interactive cinematic cut-scenes - are the single most expensive and failure-fraught way games can try to deliver them. Emily Short does a great job in her Gamasutra column of demonstrating that ’simple’ games like the time-management classic Miss Management have enormous potential for sophisticated, character driven narrative, at a fraction of the cost and the risk.

So please, someone do me a T-shirt I can wear to my next panel, so I don’t have to foam and rant at another roomful of perfectly nice papal sexologists.

Emotion =/= Story =/= Plot =/= Dialogue =/= Cut scene.

Final, hate-mail anticipation disclaimer: I’m not saying that any of these things are bad in themselves. There should be games with cinematic cut-scenes, should be games with gallons of dialogue, should be games with intricate plots, should be games which engage their players through rich stories. All I’m saying is that this is only one strategy, out of hundreds that games can employ, and that it’s an expensive strategy that’s difficult to pull off. There is no one right answer.

I have a new crusade. Can’t we make more boring games? Or rather, since we have plenty boring-gameplay games already, and plenty boring-story games already, can’t we make more games that are boring to look at? This week I’ve been alternating between Eternal Sonata, which is opulent in colour, detail, variety and the number of irrelevant little translucent things floating around at any one time, and The Fool’s Errand, which is, well - see for yourselves:

Which one has made the strongest visual impression on me? Fool’s Errand, no doubt. For those of you who aren’t, as I wasn’t, up on your late ’80s Mac puzzle games, The Fool’s Errand is a tarot-inspired precursor to games like the Professor Layton series. An over-arching story leads you from self-contained puzzle to self-contained puzzle, testing your memory, visual acuity, anagram instincts, logic skills and wretched, dogged persistence (unless you happen to like word searches). You can download it, and the executor needed to run it here, and I heartily recommend that you do. Not least because the graphical choices made out of necessity at the time mean it now looks both modern and timeless, which I swear isn’t a contradiction.

It’s got me thinking, though, about why there aren’t more monochrome games. Why were we so quick to leave black and white behind as we moved on from Pong and Spacewar!, and so quick to assume that these 15, 52, 512 or 16.7 million new colours were necessities not possibilities? Why, other than the small consideration of it being certain commercial suicide, did so few designers chose to keep things monotonous? Why can’t I think of a single voluntarily black-and-white game, from the last ten years, since my best candidate, Vib Ribbon, turns out to have a little hint of pastel indulgence in its scoring display.

However, to my delight, there’s a resurgence, led by those reliably awesome indiekids (even if they’re indiekids who’ve since been hired by the biggest game company in the world) behind Echochrome and Switch:

Beautiful both. So that’s my new crusade: more black and white games. From now on, I spurn the false god that is colour and pledge my heart and my thumbs to my new messiah, monotony. Until, that is, someone goes and spoils it all by sending me a poster of Okami. Swoon.

Thanks to having The Best Job In The World, I get to spend a fair bit of time brainstorming game pitches. These, I’ve noticed, fall into three categories. By far the most popular is the hybrid. ‘It’s Halo meets Cooking Mama!’ someone will declare, or reveal a sheaf of sketches demonstrating how Sid Meier’s Pirates! can be modded to work with the Wii Fit balance board. My experience of these is that the dumber the hybrids initially sound, the more fruitful the the design direction tends to be in the long run. Last week I sat in a room while someone explained a new project as ‘Mario Kart meets the single game in the entire world you’d think most unlikely to ever meet Mario Kart ever‘. I can’t tell you what that game was, because it’ll blow the team’s idea (feel free to barrage the comments with guesses, though), but I did have to grind the entire meeting to a point to vent my baffled scepticism. Three minutes later I was all smiles and nods. Obviously!

Then there is the blank sheet of paper. The actually new idea. These don’t come around nearly so often, and when they do they are brilliant and scary and hard. That initial blank sheet of paper soon becomes hundreds of pages of dense design doc, denied the pithy shorthands that more derivative ideas can take advantage of. Real, proper thinking has to be done. Imaginations are audibly stretched. Getting to be involved in projects like these is always a privilege but it’s a tiring, challenging and not infrequently demoralising one: actually new ideas have a scarily high failure rate.

But then there’s the anti-game. The deceptively simple process of taking an existing game and flipping its ideas - its rulesets, its assumptions, its goals, its resources and restrictions - and finding something new. I have one of those on my desk at the moment, which takes a gaming classic and adds one bit of red pen to the core design idea. And that little bit of red pen changes everything - it’s like in Saramago’s The History of the Siege Of Lisbon, where a proof-reader impulsively inserts a ‘not’ into a sentence in a history book and inadvertently remakes the entire world. I love working on anti-games; it turns game design into a game in itself, as the thought-experiment unravels and you have to jump ahead anticipating and extrapolating the consequences of that initial reversal.

Still not convinced? Then let me bring you today’s favourite anti-game. Yesterday I sent you off to Burn The Rope. Today, I invite you to solve a Fruit Mystery (sound required for both). It does exactly the opposite thing to YHTBTR, in exactly the opposite way, and yet made me exactly the same kind of happy, exactly as much. Good times, good times.

My GDC swag this year consists of: 2 USB memory sticks, 1 bruised spine, 6000 air miles, dozens of business cards, a 3-figure mobile phone bill and hundreds of un-answered emails. So, apologies if you’re waiting for me to get back to you - I’m catching up, I promise. In the meantime, as literally several of you have requested, here’s the powerpoint (10 meg, sorry) for my ‘Treat Me Like A Lover’ session. I’m not sure how much sense the slides will make on their own, so I’m working on a transcript, which I’ll post up here when it’s done. Hopefully GDCRadio will be up soon, so you can download it there, in the highly unlikely event you want to spend $8 on hearing me be smutty about Advance Wars. Cheers to everyone who turned out at the painful hour of 9am Friday to hear me rant, and thanks for all the kind comments after.

Happy Christmas? Hope so. Perhaps you ate turkey, watched Doctor Who, and fell asleep in front of the fire. Perhaps you had beef teriyaki, played squash and stayed up late stargazing. Either way, there’s an above average chance you did something that absolute baffles me: played a board game.

I loathe board games, but my defenses are down at Christmas. There’s a roomful of people, each with a bellyful of wine and warmth. Telly seems antisocial, but something must be done if you’re all to avoid dozing off. And someone has a big new box, full of cards and counters and dice and totems and it really does seem like a good idea. This year it was Top Gear: Race The Stig. It seems to have sold out almost everywhere, which is awfully depressing.

Now, even I agree that board games have their merits, one of which is that unlike many Christmas gifts, getting them going doesn’t start with vexations like ‘has anyone got three AAA batteries?’ Should you wish to race The Stig, however, that’s exactly what you’ll need. Instead of dice it has something that looks a little like an executive electronic desk barometer from the 1994 Innovations Catalogue. This controls the game, which consists of you moving your little Stig helmet round the board in a mechanised version of top trumps. As you play you accumulate money, which allows you to upgrade your capabilities (top speed, 0-60, etc). Each time you press the desk barometer, it tells you The Stig’s notional rating in that category. If yours is better you move on six spaces, if it’s worse, you move on one.

Almost everything about the game is shockingly broken. It’s called ‘Race The Stig’, but there is no Stig, and you’re only racing each other. The conceit that represents your upgrade in each category is that you’re buying a better car, but there’s no meaning or advantage to these - all that matters is that you’ve got a level 4 and the desk barometer is currently saying that The Stig has a level 3. There are chance cards, but the pile is so thick, and the number of occasions they are called into use so few, that the tactical parings offered (do you buy an ‘extra fuel tank’ card, to protect against the possibility of getting hit with a ‘you’ve run out of fuel’ card later on?) are totally irrelevant. The game calls for players to continually run other players off the board, for one or more turns, but there is no way to keep track of how many turns players have missed, or of where they were on the board before they got booted off.

I appreciate Race The Stig is not selling to discerning table-toppers. But, much as with videogames, that excuse makes no sense to me. The group of people I was playing with (not least thanks to those winey bellies) were far more in need of a bullet-proof, crystal clear, perfectly balanced play experience than a batch of hardened pros used to wrangled complex games into satisfying submission. Indeed, I tend to find that almost everything I know and understand about videogames applies to board games, which serves to highlight how closely related they are, and reveal the big conundrum I still don’t understand.

Why do I hate board games if I love videogames? They are, functionally, the same thing. Many videogames that I adore are just automated board games. I once spent an entire day proving that you could play Disgaea with nothing more technical than a handful of dice and a shelf of reference books. Admittedly, each move of each character required something like 134 separate calculations, but it could be done by someone with +72 Patience (and possible a stackable Mental Arithmetic bonus). And while Halo, Gradius, Virtua Fighter or Project Gotham may not have board game cousins, it’s obvious that most strategy games, RPGs and many puzzlers are just virtual boxes full of cards and counters, dice and totems. If I love Advance Wars on my GBA - even Dice Wars on my browser - why does my blood run cold when I meet them in the real world?

So these are the questions that I’m left with. Why are so many board games, especially ‘casual’ board games, so dreadful? Are bad board games worse than bad videogames? What is the alchemy that occurs when you turn one into the other? Is it just that videogames are faster than board games? Am I really so much of a savage that I’m drawn purely to the flashing lights and colours? Is the problem that board games are fundamentally social and I am fundamentally not? And can anyone suggest something we can play next year that won’t make my blood boil? And don’t say Wii Sports, or you’re off my Christmas list for good.

I admit it: I like sums. My desk is covered in bits of paper covered in scrawled estimates of tick rates, mana effiencies and crit stats. Actual maths has always daunted me, but sums? Sums are comfort food for your brain. Soothing, repetitive, reassuring - it’s really just a different kind of doodling, except when someone walks in on you, they apologise anxiously and walk away impressed with your industry. My doodles have never impressed anyone.

So what could be better than sums? Sums in games, of course. You may have spent your summer enslaved to Plupon, or already be wrestling with Add ‘Em Up, in which case you don’t need me to tell you how hypnotic adding up can be. But if you’re yet to fall under their sway, or are looking for a new numerological overlord, then may I point you to Chain Factor? What at first sight is yet another block-dropper is actually a rather subtle puzzler, asking you to match the digits on each disc with the number of discs in each row or column. All your usual strategies are completely irrelevant here, so switch off your Tetris/Puzzle Fighter/Baku Baku instincts and prepare to feel the blood flowing to entirely new bits of your brain. The only tactic I’ve definitely sussed so far is to use the ‘1′ discs to hammer away at exposed grays at the tops of towers. For some reason this reminds me very strongly of smashing eggs on the tops of bald people’s heads.

It’s rare to find a free Flash game this good, this fresh, and this polished - please do have the sound on when you play. And that seems to be due in no small part to the vehement passion of its developers, as revealed in the game’s FAQ:

The games industry is poised on the brink of a profound transformation. Games have the potential to be the most powerful artform ever invented, an unparalleled medium for the exploration of dynamic interactive systems and the expression of complex emotional, social, and political ideas.

But the creative power of games is being held hostage by the conservative forces of the marketplace. For years, the mainstream games industry has fed us a steady stream of lowest-common-denominator drivel: brightly colored mascots scampering around childish fantasy lands; hyper-violent, testosterone-soaked war simulators; vacuous, marketing-driven movie spin-offs; and the endless grind of mindless, massively-multiplayer treadmills.

Chain Factor offers an alternative: an independent game designed outside the traditional channels of development and distribution and driven by a singular vision: put the power back into the hands of the players and let them create the game they want to play.

Stirring stuff. But, turns out after some proxy Googling (thanks, B!) that this post should really be called Playing by the Numb3rs, because Chain Factor is actually part of an ARG spawned from CBS’s maths-detectives show of the same name. A recent episode, Primacy, centered on a fictional ARG, and a range of tip-offs and related adverts have followed in its wake. Play long enough, and anomalous things start happening. I won’t spoil it, just in case you want to follow the experience for yourself, but there seems to be a wiki growing up here, if you enjoy the meta-game of watching everyone else play more than playing yourself.

It’s almost a disappointment to discover that it’s corporate-fueled, rather than the work of plucky indies, but then you realise that the developer’s call to arms, rather than being empty invective (or deliberately tongue-in-ARG play-acting), it’s probably a very fair point. Under normal circumstances, Chain Factor would be an unusually good, unusually polished Flash freebie, struggling to get noticed and barely making money. As it is, it’s unusually good, unusually polished, finding a wide audience and paid cash-on-the-barrelhead by CBS. It may not be quite the process you imagined when you read ‘an independent game designed outside the traditional channels of development and distribution and driven by a singular vision’, but you have to admit it qualifies on all fronts. I look forward to some interesting developer interviews once all the alternate reality cats are out of the game bag.

Come with me down memory lane. Remember Soda Play’s Constructor? That nifty springs-and-sprockets creature-machine builder from a few years ago, that made you 100 times more excited than Meccano (I did warn you about memory lane), but ultimately crushed you with the revelation of your own ineptitude, impatience and lack of creativity? Well, Soda Play are back, only now instead of creature-machines, you can make games.

Newtoon is a Java tool which lets you make little 2D physics-based games entirely out of balls and springs. You can fix balls to the play-field or leave them to bounce free, and springs can be adjusted for tension. This being Soda Play, you can tweak things like gravity and friction. So far, so familiar, right? But the game bit comes in through some devilishly simple grammar. Each ball can, if you so chose, be designated a goal, hazard, or player token. The token can be controlled by the arrow keys: touch a hazard and it’s game over, touch the goal and it’s a win. And suddenly, all of 90 seconds later, you’ve made your first game.

I’ve done my time with idiot-proof game creators - with RPG Maker, and Dark Basic and various modding tools, but am usually defeated by the same failings that Meccano used to reveal. With Newtoon, it will take an actual act of an actual god to prevent you from making a game. It’s the Wario Ware of game-makers, something you really can play with for 2 minutes and find rewarding.

And, actually, it really is the Wario Ware of game-makers, as you can collect your own and other creators’ mini-games into ’stacks’ which will remind you very much of that very game. Much in the manner of Constructor all your games can be saved to Soda Play’s website. I also seem to remember something in the beta about being able to download game stacks to play on your mobile phone, but no sign of that at present.

Basically, if you’ve got an hour to kill between now and lunch, you can use Newtoon to become an experienced game-maker. Just think how much more authority your forum posts will have when you can preface them with ‘In the games that I’ve made…’! Or, if you’re already an experienced game-maker, just think how gratifying it will be watching your friends, family and foes discover that it isn’t as easy as it looks, even when it looks this easy.

And, if that’s given you the taste for drawing things in 2D and watching physics happen to them, then I’d recommend spending the afternoon playing Crayon Physics. And then writing mass petitions to Nintendo to get it a DS deal.

The New Scientist has a nice link to a report (PDF alert) from some Austrian AI specialists, which suggests that being neurotic may be a key competitive advantage in gaming. Working with Age Of Mythology, they’ve set out to discover if the attractiveness of a game is affected by how emotionally or neurotically the AI within it behaves. By creating four bots, with normal, aggressive, defensive and neurotic personalities, they discovered that the neurotic version was the most successful, winning as often as the aggressive AI, and in substantially quicker times.

The hallmarks of a neurotic AI? Extreme playing styles, and an irrational assessment of available resources. You’re welcome to quibble about whether or not those are reasonable extrapolations of neuroticism, as defined by the Big Five factors of personality the researchers were working from, but they certainly aren’t traits most game AI designers are aiming for.

I suspect the researchers will ultimately find what any seasoned gamer could have told them off the bat: emotional, irrational AIs sound like a great idea, but it practice they decrease the attractiveness of the game to the player. Those carefully constructed irrationalities can all too often feel like buggy, unfair flaws rather than a sophisticated approximation of a human. AI doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does need to be reliable - I have extremely fond memories of Advance War’s rock-solid, flawed CPU opponents, who could be relied on to pursue cheap, empty APCs rather than your more valuable units. If they had only done it erratically, it would have driven me mad. But do it rain or shine, day or night, and it becomes a tactical tool.

For many gamers, however, playing against any AI is a shoddy second-best, no substitute for the unpredictable thrill of playing against real people. But isn’t that a contradiction? If unpredictability is a bonus in a human opponent, why is it a flaw in a mechanical one? Here’s the research I’d like those Austrians to do next. Have people play against their neurotic bots. Tell half that it’s an AI opponent, and half that it’s another human player. I put my money on the second group having a better impression of the attractiveness of the game than the first. We’re just fundamentally more forgiving of people than we are of AIs. No wonder they’re turning neurotic.

I’m always uncomfortable around game clones. In one respect they seem to represent the one of the things I like most about gaming culture - that it attracts crowds of iterative magpies, who love the games they play and love the idea that they could make them better. And, in others, it’s gaming at its worst: disrespectful, lazy, shabbily commercialised.

Can’t think what put that issue in my head, especially since I was playing MySims - the DS one - over the weekend. But whether or not you think it’s clone-ware, and whether or not you think clone-ware is evil, you can’t deny that it’s a game that had at its disposal not just a very close role model, but a role model of unusual excellence. So how is that that at every single stage of the first five minutes of MySims, it alienates and annoys me?

The first thing you hit is the language: ” Please choose the gender of your player character,” it asks frostily. Wow, I feel welcomed and connected to your cute, vibrant world. Has EA considered making a driving licence application process simulator, do you think? I reckon that’s a niche it could own.

But I choose, and so, a few hair-cuts and skin colours later, I’m dumped into the world. Town is due east, I’m told by the charisma-free ship’s captain. Great, I think, and prepare to set off, only to have my gender-assigned-player-character whisked out of my control. It trots into town, starts chasing a boy in a dog-helmet, runs out of puff (why couldn’t I chose the fitness of my player-character, hmm?) and decides to walk into a building. Brilliant. So much for me forging any early, precious sense of identity with that player-character. Why tell me I need to go east if you’re not going to let me go where I want? Why assume I’d want to chase the boy?

Never mind. Here I am in a house, with a woman. I can, the game chirps, ‘touch the Sim directly to initiate conversation’. I tell you, there’s not a weekend goes by here without our neighbours calling the police cos we’re all initiating conversations like crazy. Plus, if it’s suddenly OK to call her a Sim, why couldn’t we have been calling my player-character that from the beginning? Wouldn’t that have made it seem a bit more like an engaging, consistent world?

But here I am carping away, when this Sim, who I have touched, is experiencing a crisis. Her grandson is missing, and she’s too busy to talk to me. Also too busy, it seems, to do anything except stand still. Certainly too busy to go and look for her grandson. I wait for further instructions, but sadly the game doesn’t say if I can ‘touch the Sim to instill a sense of responsibility and constructive effort’. So, I haul myself off to where on the map the grandson is, play a mini-game (mini-task, really) to get him to come to his senses and Whoop! He hadn’t realised how worried she was. He’s going to head straight back. Except, in what I’m beginning to understand is a family trait, he’s going to accomplish that by standing rooted to the spot. I check his status screen. He’s ‘heading quietly back to the mayor’s home’, the game assures me. More imperceptibly than quietly, it would seem.

Not to worry. Back to the lady mayor’s house to explain that she can relax, I’ve found the lost boy, but he’s lost the use of his legs. However, in the course of his adventure he’s clearly gained miraculous replacement powers of locomotion because as I enter the house - pling! I see on the map that he’s teleported straight home at the last minute. Quick work - almost as impressive as how effectively the game entirely de-valued the point of me going to get him. Is there a quicker way for a game to strip away all that boring, colourful, appealing game-world stuff and reveal its core mechanics in all their ugly, empty, manipulative glory?

And then there’s a flower-planting task - how could there not be? But instead of giving me any creative input, or any sense of customisation or ownership of the world, the game gives me a pocketful of identical red tulips and demands I place them in pre-ordained flower beds. Fine. I do eight, get bored, return to the quest giver. No dice. I’ve got to put them in ALL the spaces in ALL the flower beds. Fine. Back to the flower beds. Not fine. There are 14 spaces and only 10 slots in my inventory, so I’ve run out. Now I understand why the flower-lady said I could come back for more ‘if I ran out.’ Although I don’t quite understand why she didn’t say ‘when I ran out’, since the game had made that an inevitability. But fine. Back to her, and back to the flower beds. At least, I think, I’ll end up with 6 bonus tulips. I return for my pat on the head, and she takes the spare tulips off me. Not fine.

And on it goes. Three screens of repeated dialogue to get into each shop. Shops that dump you out of the whole process if you decide you’ve picked the wrong category. Mini-games that don’t have a retry option. Characters who you trek across the world to find, and who then teleport when you’re six feet away, because the clock trips from day to night and they’re supposed to be home. The game itself, when you get to it, might be brilliant. But why make it so hard to get to it? Why have an otherwise functioning, appealing game riddled with so many tiny, cheap, fixable hiccups?

Five minutes in, and I take it all back. MySims is radically, daringly unique. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where every single interaction I’ve encountered from game start to first save is so needlessly flawed. Maybe instead of Animal Crossing, EA should have cribbed a bit harder from The 400.